Interview with Liav Chen, CEO at Humanz: the AI-Based Influencer Marketing Platform

Humanz is a platform that leverages artificial intelligence to monetize influencer marketing collaborations between brands and social media influencers. It’s about finding the trustworthy influencers online that will deliver your messages as a brand to the relevant audience in the most convincing way.

Humanz solves the fraud problem – fake likes and fake followers and it offers benchmarks and access to millions of influencers on all the social media platforms. We believe that everyone can influence, the trick is to find the most relevant influencers for your budget and for your needs (awareness, sales etc). The platform offers payment solutions to influencers, vetting capabilities to each profile, and smart search based on proprietary AI we developed that is backed up by the IIA (Israeli Innovation Authority).

Since our Launch in 2019, we’ve gained 200+ leading brands that use the platform as in a subscription model such as Kimberly Clarck, Unilever, Adidas, Zara, Visa, MCD, Becko, Loreal, and advertising agencies such as McCann, Publicis, Interaction, and Media Com.
 
 

 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
The company was founded by 5 veterans of 8200 elite technological units of the IDF. We served together for 6 years and in the last year, one of our friends told us about the marketing practice that he uses to create awareness for weekend parties that he was organizing, mainly for university students.

I asked him “ how much do you pay for these Instagram influencers” and he told me “as much as they demand”. I then asked him “how do you know it’s worth it” and he told me that it’s just how things are working. I knew he was a smart man, he had an Msc in Mathematics. So the answers surprised me. I did a quick google search and saw that it’s not just him but all the leading brands in the world are facing these hardships and questions – not knowing how to measure influencers and how to predict their performance.

Then I figured, why not take our experience with data and machine learning to the social media landscape and come up with a leading platform for these needs – as this marketing practice will only grow during the time.
 

How has the company evolved during the pandemic?

 
At the beginning of the pandemic, we had our budgets frozen from the brands we work with, as everyone was afraid and didn’t know what the future would look like.

After 2 months we all got used to the new reality and social media gathered a lot of traction. Lockdowns, days off from work, and the engagement in social media was telling the actual story – the consumers were spending their entire day on their mobile devices and on social media. We released a benchmark report with statistics pre and post covid and the advertisers understood there was an opportunity.

We finished 2020 with 30% over our pre covid sales KPIs.
 

What can we hope to see from Humanz in the future?

 
We are in growth mode, currently launching in the US market, it’s our 8th country we launched in the past 2 years together with Israel, South Africa, Turkey, India, UK, Brazil.

The future is about social commerce, integrating with eCommerce platforms and advertisers’ direct-to-consumer strategies. Our R&D team is always innovating and we are working to create a standard in the practice we all know as “influencer marketing”, in order to make it smarter, better, and easier to use – for every advertiser out there.